and even though the mirror paints a picture much too clear
by Nagia
Summary: They all have their coping mechanisms. Stiles's just happens to be a Schedule II. Stiles/Derek pre-slash.


Takes place in some nebulous part of Season 2, after the police station massacre but before everything else got shot to hell. Not intended to be autobiographical, but still some personal experiences crept in. I don't intend to speak for everyone who takes Adderall, but the way Stiles handles his in Season 1 (and to an extent Season 2) made me twitch, and now here we are.

Thanks to Cheloya and Cait for beta-reading and holding my hand. Any mistakes are mine.

* * *

"More problems concentrating?" Dr. Williams - Sarah, he calls her on good days - repeats. She arches a thick dark eyebrow, but her tone is gentle enough that she's asking Stiles to elaborate rather than outright asking him to tell her something she can believe.

He's been seeing her to manage the ADHD for five years. He knows the score, these days. So Stiles just leans back in his chair and looks at the ceiling.

"Yeah, even more than usual. It's like I'm doing it to myself, I guess. I'm always looking around, listening for someone behind me, and I just can't get anything done outside a hyperfocus." Because it occurs to him, he adds, "I almost took a swing at Finstock."

"That sounds like hypervigilance," Sarah says. Her eyes are on him, and they're grass-green, green as Derek's usually are, but where Derek is a bundle of fuckedupitude, Sarah just seems calm.

"It's always hyper something," he says.

He doesn't actually mind the ADHD - he's pretty sure it's actually kind of an advantage, or would be, if he had any kind of impulse control without Adderall. But most of the time, it lets him think three steps ahead just by virtue of him speed-reading his own thoughts, and it can let him process a lot more if he switches between tasks.

But right now, it's being a pain in the ass. It hasn't been this rough since they first started noticing the symptoms, right around first or second grade.

"Considering the recent events in the police station, I don't think you can really be blamed for hypervigilance." Sarah smiles faintly, then indicates his chair. He'd dragged it a bit before he sat, putting his back to the corner.

He can't actually see the door except in his peripheral vision, but at least he has that.

And Stiles realizes that he's never done this in Sarah's office before.

Sarah says, very softly, "I'd say you're having a post-traumatic reaction. If you want to work on that, I can refer you to someone. As for the ADHD, would you like to try switching medications in the meantime, or would you like to step up the occupational therapy aspects of our work together?"

Stiles just stares.

"You have a choice, Stiles. You always have choices."

"They're not always good ones," he says. And smacks a hand onto his knee to keep it from bouncing. He's practically vibrating in his chair, and isn't sure how long he's been doing it.

That draws a laugh from Sarah. "No, not always," she says. "Sometimes life feels like deciding between the least bad of several awful options, doesn't it?"

"You can say that again," Stiles agrees. It draws a smile from Sarah, but she doesn't repeat herself, and Stiles rocks the chair on its back legs as he thinks. She doesn't reprimand him for it.

"I think," he says after a while, "that I don't want to risk switching. The Adderall works, and I can't afford to slip. Junior year, you know? But maybe we can talk about upping the dose?"

"Of course." Sarah's quiet for a few moments, before she finally says, "I'm not sure how comfortable I am with simply writing a blanket script to up your dosage - at higher doses, the side effects can be awful - so how about we stagger it? One day on a higher dose, one day on your regular, and then we meet up in two weeks to discuss how you feel?"

Three years ago, he would have been stunned to hear Sarah discuss his meds as if they're purely his decision. But he's seventeen years old, a high school junior with grades that leave him a contender for salutatorian. His meds absolutely are his decision.

Stiles thinks about it, and then nods. "Yeah. Maybe don't up the dose by too much?"

* * *

One of the things about the ADHD that nobody except Stiles and his Dad really think about it: hypersensitivity. He's talked to a few other people with it, and he's met people who freak out over touch or bright light, but for Stiles the worst is always sound. It was worse when he was a kid - he'd once been reduced to hiding under the chair with his hands over his ears in a Mexican restaurant, back before his mother got sick - but now that he's constantly listening for the sound of somebody approaching, it's gotten worse again. Shrill or sudden noises are leaving him jumping out of his skin.

Fucking hypervigilance.

His goddamn brain is never going to do him any favors.

So Stiles takes one of his new doses of Adderall, pairs it with a couple of ibuprofen, and washes it all down with water. He thinks about maybe chasing that with coffee or orange juice, somethig acidic, but speeding up the process will shorten the half-life. It's not usually by much, not really noticeable, but he'd like to have as long as he can without the noise issues.

Plus he'd really like to concentrate.

It's been about two hours when he surfaces from where he'd been cross-referencing one of his new ebooks with some stuff Deaton told him about druidic traditions and trying to determine what's real, what's myth, and what might actually be useful. He feels clear. Jittery. His jaw aches.

And from behind him, Derek Hale asks, "Why is your heartbeat like that?"

Whoah, okay, heart in throat time. Heart, please get out of throat. It's only Derek. Juuuust Derek and his horrible habit of being places without Stiles knowing he was there.

"Why is my heart like what?" Stiles asks, turning around. He presses a hand to his chest and pauses. "Maybe because you scared the crap out of me, dude."

Derek's eyebrows arch like they disagree. Stiles sometimes wonders if they're some sort of symbiote - Derek gives them a face to live on and nourishment, and they communicate with outside life forms. He's not actually wondering that now; he feels too clear, too focused, to actually think about that now. But the old thought lingers at the edges of his thoughts like perfume across the years.

"What, you think I'm lying?"

"Your heart rate was up before I opened the window."

"Maybe I psychically sensed that you were about to get your stalker on."

"I've been here half an hour," Derek says, and his eyebrows arch slightly higher before they drop back to normal position. It's his Ha I Have Won This Argument expression.

"You sat around listening to my heart for that long? I'd be flattered if it didn't sound like you're, I don't know, going to rip my throat out with your teeth, pull off my head, and stuff it in my own freezer."

"You were completely in your own world, researching things that might be useful." Derek gives him half a shrug, and Stiles knows it's not the whole answer, but it's enough of an honest one that he also knows he won't get anything else if he pushes.

That's the worst thing about Derek. Well, no. On a bad day, Stiles would say that pretty much everything about Derek is the worst thing about him. But Derek Hale knows how to shut his mouth and keep it that way. There's no cracking him without really good leverage.

Stiles leans back in his chair, causing part of it to rest against the desk. He tilts his head back, looking at the ceiling. And then he sighs. "Not that it's any of your business, but I'm on Adderall. I just upped my dose. The heart thing is probably a side effect."

"Go back to the lower dose," Derek says, because not only does he think it's totally fine to climb in through Stiles's windows, he also apparently runs Stiles's life and knows how to manage his ADHD for him.

Neither Derek nor his eyebrows appreciate it when Stiles says pretty much exactly that. Since Stiles doesn't really appreciate Derek's face right now, he'd say they're about even.

"Okay, so besides being completely creepy and kind of vindicating us suspecting you for murder, what did you want?"

Derek leans forward, pulls a folded scrap of paper from a pocket in his jacket.

* * *

Stiles doesn't fall asleep until after four AM, and of course, because this is his life, has to be out the door by seven thirty. And the research isn't even what keeps him awake; he does a cursory couple of searches on Derek's side project, but he gives up pretty easily.

No. He lies in bed on his back, still and quiet and staring up at the ceiling, and sleep does not come. He feels vaguely tired, but not tired enough to sleep. Instead he just holds his eyes open and chases thoughts around for hours, and tries to ignore that his insomnia hasn't been this bad since he was a kid.

* * *

Four days after that, as he shuffles gratefully out of Harris's classroom (literally every other student in the room is so eager to escape that they've created a clogged knot extending ten feet from the door), Stiles has to massage his jaw. It's begun to ache.

At lunch, he sits next to Scott. Scott gives him a concerned look, but Stiles just taps his head and rolls his eyes, and Scott smiles ruefully. He knows it's just stupid brain chemistry stuff, and he knows better than to expect Stiles to want to talk about it. Especially at school.

When Erica loudly drags a chair and plops herself into it next to Stiles, he damn near jumps out of his skin. His heart, which had probably been pretty fast to begin with, begins to race so fast he can feel it in his chest. What is it with the Leather Family and their weird desire to make his heart jump into his throat?

"Are you like contractually obligated to move on, like, silent shadowy cat feet despite your scary pointy heels or whatever? Or did Derek tell you to use your werewolf stealthiness on the guy who just upped his stimulant dose, because the shit his heart does is hilarious?"

Both Scott and Erica are staring at him. Scott's gaze has actually zeroed in on his ribcage, right where his heart should be. Erica tilts her head, listening to something, and then narrows her eyes thoughtfully.

Stiles just sighs and unpacks his lunch. He packed a pita wrap filled with hummus, spinach, and shredded chicken, but just looking at it makes him feel kind of ill. He looks at his little tub of yogurt and feels downright ulpy at the thought of putting it in his mouth. In fact, not even his apple looks appetizing, and he'd packed both yogurt and apple in the hopes of finding _something_ in his lunch bag he actually wanted to eat.

It totally figures that he wouldn't. Honestly, he feels kind of itchy in his skin and would just rather be doing something useful or interesting instead of sitting around eating.

"Want my yogurt? Actually, just take the yogurt and the wrap. It's chicken and hummus."

Erica smiles, and for a minute he could swear her teeth are sharp. "I don't like hummus, but Isaac will eat it."

"Take it," Stiles says. "Take it with my blessing. I can't even look at it right now."

He forces himself to eat the apple, but neither his mouth nor his stomach seem to care much about it.

* * *

Of course, he gets home after practice at half seven, and he's so hungry he wants to fill his stomach with everything in the house. In fact, he's so hungry that _chewing_ seems like too much effort, never mind cooking.

So he fixes himself a wrap to replace the one he gave away, and tries to ignore the way his stomach roils and gnaws, hot and empty, even as he stuffs his face.

* * *

"I've been jittery and it's not as easy to sleep," he tells Sarah at their next appointment. "And I keep, like, clenching my jaw and I don't even know I'm doing it. And I'm basically never hungry until I get home from school. I've stopped bothering to take a lunch."

Sarah nods, taking it all in. She's quiet a minute before she leans forward. Her eyes crinkle slightly and worry lines form on the bridge of her nose. "Do you want to lower the dose?"

Stiles doesn't say anything.

"Stiles, considering your reactions to sedatives in the past, and your family history," which is _such_ a nice way to reference his father's addictive personality and brush with the bottle after his mother's death, or maybe also his maternal grandfather's actual alcoholism (he'd died of liver failure three years before Stiles had even been born), "I really can't in good conscience prescribe you anything to help with the sleep."

"I'll up the exercise," he says. If his voice is a little cold, well, what about it? He doesn't see her to talk about his dad, or his mom, or his mother's family. He sees her to work on coping strategies and navigate the complicated world of existing with ADHD and manage his medication.

Sarah nods. "So you don't want to return to the previous dose?"

"No, I don't think so," he says. "I think I like the day-high, day-low set up. For now. Gives me a breather, you know?"

She gives him a tight, controlled smile. She doesn't know, of course. She doesn't actually have it; she's just in the business of helping people manage it. Stiles wonders what it would be like, to have a psychiatrist who could empathize.

* * *

Scott doesn't come over that nIght, but they're up until the ass end of irresponsibility playing Mass Effect 3's multiplayer. Stiles has to switch from his salarian Infiltrator because his hands are shaking too much and every shot with the Widow counts. He brings in his krogan Vanguard instead. Scott pulls in his. They spend a few rounds taking down Cerberus on Firebase White with melee kills and Charge spam, and get thoroughly cursed by a quarian Engineer.

"What the fuck ever, man," Stiles says the twelfth time the Engineer calls Scott a team-wiping fucktard who might as well bend over and spread his cheeks for the AI, "he kept a phantom from stabbing your face; it's not our fault you suck."

"I'm playing with goddamn children," the Engineer hisses. Then he ragequits, and because he was the match host, the fucking thing restarts. Asshole.

"We're never playing with that guy again," Scott says, and Stiles just laughs.

"Forget Mass Effect," he says. "Let's do the multi on AssCreed." He's totally tricked out his Doctor since the last time they played that one.

"Nah, Team Fortress 2," Scott says, and they both say, "Bonk!" at once.

He doesn't actually get to switch over from ME3 to TF2, because his window slides open. And Derek comes in.

"Nevermind, Scotty, I gotta go," he says, and not only quits ME3 but turns his 360 off entirely. To Derek, he says, "I didn't get very far on your little research project."

"You've had two weeks," Derek says.

"I've been catching up on classwork. Haven't been focusing well since the police station. You didn't tell me it was, like, urgent." Not that Derek ever tells him when things are urgent; usually they're self-evidently so, but the words on that little slip of paper just seem…like a last resort, like a long shot. Like something that can wait.

"That's why you -?" But Derek doesn't finish the sentence. If Stiles didn't know that Scott was still judging the fuck out of Derek for turning three needy teenagers (and Jackson) and distrustful of Erica and Boyd, he'd have almost thought Scott had pointed out how not kosher it is to bitch at him about how he manages his brain chemistry. Maybe somebody hit Derek with a book on Not Failing At People.

"Yeah. That's why I went and saw my psychiatrist and changed my Adderall dose, not that it's any of your business."

"It makes your heart sound wrong," Derek grumps, as if the way Stiles's heart sounds to freaky werewolf hearing is relevant at all to Stiles's life.

"Well, it makes my brain run right, so put on your big girl panties and plug your ears."

Derek growls. Stiles just looks at him, and for once doesn't say anything. He tries to shoot out mental eye lasers of You Are Not Welcome, but he probably doesn't have the eyebrows for it.

"Just don't poison yourself until you've printed out your findings on the rowan carvings," Derek says. Then he leaves.

Stiles doesn't even feel bad about mimicking him in falsetto when he can prooooobably still hear him. Climb in his window during Scott And Stiles Videogame Time, demand results on a really stupid side-project that doesn't even have anything to do with Gerard Argent or the kanima (probably), and then bitch about his meds? Yeah, nope. That is totally license to mock.

* * *

It settles into a routine. The wolf crowd are all intensely weirded out by him on his high days, and Erica keeps trying to get him to eat. She's figured out the sweet spot between practice and when he gets home, and he's found her in his Jeep twice now.

Both times, she's grinned and said, "Get in, loser."

"We're not going shopping," Stiles replies the second time.

"Come on, Batman, let me tempt you a little." Her red, red mouth curves wickedly. "Let's do seafood. My treat."

"Sushi," Stiles says, "and if you cover yours in soy sauce, I'm shoving wasabi up your nose with a chopstick."

Erica only grins, and doesn't say anything when he uses the low-sodium soy sauce. She picks her sushi up in her fingers to eat it, and tells him to put his damn chopsticks down - does he want to look like a barbarian?

"Barbarians eat with their hands," Stiles replies, and Erica just laughs and laughs, and he feels better about everything.

* * *

A week after that, Stiles takes refuge from his chemistry homework - because fuck Adrian Harris, the man is clearly the devil - in Uncharted 2. He's climbing something (of course he's climbing something; it's a Naughty Dog parkour game) when his window slides open.

"Well?"

Stiles sighs and hits the PS button, then heads over to his desk.

"Runes carved out of rowan wood aren't useless, exactly, but it's better to just carve the runes into living rowan trees. Think you can plant rowan trees in a train station?"

Derek's face freezes. His eyebrows are stuck somewhere between 'backhand Stiles's head into a hard surface' and 'mildly annoyed,' and his mouth has curved down into an almost pouty frown. It's kind of ungodly how pretty all the werewolves in his life are. Is it some sort of Twilight "perfect predator" crap?

"Ugh, sit with me. We'll figure out some kind of ward that doesn't involve, I don't know, planting trees or killing babies."

He doesn't even glance at the clock before he pulls his Adderall bottle out of his desk drawer. He swishes his tongue around his mouth for a second, working up spit, and then swallows the new dose dry.

Half an hour later, his heart feels like it's beating faster while he and Derek are bitching back and forth about biosphere necklaces. But they'd have to crack the damn thing open, carve the rune in, and then set the necklace back up as a biosphere. Sounds like more trouble than it's worth, and Google though Stiles might, he sees no sign of rowan trees in biosphere necklaces. Lots of moss, though. So basically that's a wash.

They talk for another half hour about the reliability of a website that glosses over the uses of rowan in favor of talking about mountain ash and salt and breadcrumbs. It has a few runes and suggestions for making wards without blood sacrifices, though.

And then Derek reaches out and catches him by the wrist. The grip is strong, pinpricks of heat encircling his arm, and Stiles looks down to realize his hands are shaking. Stiles's heart pounds, his pulse throbbing not only in his ears but his chest, too, god is his heart supposed to beat that hard? Is it just sudden non-violent physical contact?

Derek's eyebrows furrow in anger. "Stiles."

But his heart is still thudding. He halfway wonders if it's going to explode beneath his ribcage in a stringy, bloody mess. Each beat of his heart is actually starting to hurt. Not just in the muscle itself, but in his chest around it, and he can feel the rabbit-fast twitch-twinge of his pulse in his throat. He claps a hand to his chest.

"Stiles."

"Hurts," he says. "This a heart attack?" He can't seem to get enough air. His lungs burn, but the area around his heart is the worst. It's worse than red hot, it's white hot and stabbing and throbbing all at once, both sharp and broad, and there is no helping the terror.

Derek stands, yanking him by the wrist he's still holding, and heads out of the room and down the stairs. He all but drags Stiles along in his wake, and every movement makes his heart and chest hate him more. They're out the back door, not bothering to lock it, and Stiles is glad that his father isn't home tonight. Then it's across the lawn in a blur of feet and agony and fear, into the Camaro.

High Alpha Grouchypants hasn't said a word throughout the dizzying exit, and he doesn't say anything as he starts the car. He's completely silent while streetlights whip past them in a bright blur, or maybe he isn't and Stiles just can't hear him over the pain and the fear. Maybe Derek is telling him that everything's going to be fine, but that doesn't seem like a Derek thing to do.

Stiles just presses his hand over his heart and tries to think of calm things, tries to reassure himself that he is not actually dying. It works about as well as he would expect.

Either an eyeblink or an eternity have passed when they reach the hospital. Derek parks almost haphazardly and, yet again, all but drags him toward the ER entrance.

"Stiles Stillinski," he tells the nurse at the ER's front desk, "Sheriff's son, Adderall overdose, chest pain, increased heart rate."

"We'll take him straight back," the nurse says.

Derek just glares at her and says, "I'm going with him. He's not eighteen; someone should be there."

The nurse doesn't argue. Stiles doesn't blame her - Derek's eyebrows look like they will murder the next person to disagree with him - and honestly he's kind of glad, because this is scary and painful as fuck.

* * *

Nurses take his heartrate and blood pressure and draw blood and run an ECG, and nobody will tell him anything. He rattles off his dosage, confesses that he thinks he double or triple dosed on accident half an hour ago, and Derek lurks in a corner of the treatment room and glares at anything that breathes or moves or makes noise. But he doesn't glare at Stiles.

And then the nurses leave the treatment room and don't come back, and Stiles is alone with Derek and his fucked up heart and his fucked up brain.

After a few minutes of Stiles with his hand pressed to his chest, gasping, Derek finally creeps his way forward and presses a hand to Stiles's shoulder. Stiles looks down and watches the black veins spread over Derek's hand and wrist.

The crippling chest pain lessens, though it doesn't go away completely. And Derek mutters something that could either be _Jesus_ or _Idiot_. Stiles isn't listening close enough to tell.

Twenty minutes later, somebody in a labcoat as well as scrubs knocks on the door and steps through. Derek has migrated closer to the front of the room, and looks about ready to take the doctor's head off. Either for intruding or for not getting here sooner; there's no telling with Derek.

"Mr. Stillinski?"

"Yeah?"

The doctor cracks a faint smile. "I'm Doctor Crabtree. I've got good news and bad news. Good news is, you're not in fibrillation. This is a cardiac issue, but not what you would characterize as a heart attack. The bad news is, you've experienced a rather frightening episode of tachycardia, most likely due to medication mismanagement."

"Medication mismanagement," Stiles says.

Crabtree pulls a rolling stool over, seats himself on it, and sighs. He looks straight at Stiles, makes eye contact. "You admit to possibly doubling or trebling your dose, and you don't think that's mismanagement?"

"It's not my psychiatrist's fault."

"No," Crabtree says, "it's yours. Maybe it's the ADHD impulsiveness, maybe it's being a dumbshit teenager who thinks he's immortal, but you've been treating a medication with potential effects on your health like it's either a cure-all or a toy."

And though Stiles bristles, he can't even say that Crabtree is wrong. He's been taking the new dose when he's wanted it, when he's felt he needed it, and he's been ignoring the concerns of people who can actually hear his heartbeat. Been ignoring the side effects. He's blithely ignored every reason to scale back and gone full speed ahead.

Crabtree heaves a sigh. "Listen. I was diagnosed with adult ADD. I get why you're doing this. I understand thinking that all the side effects are worth it for the precious hours where you can just... get things done. Without a thousand things pressing in. And I understand that your life is getting more hectic as you age, not as easy to schedule, but you need to stick as close to a med schedule as you can."

"So this doesn't happen again," Stiles says.

"Exactly." Crabtree smiles. "I don't ever want to see you in here for this again."

"Why did it hurt here," Stiles gestures - "so much?"

"My guess is you strained the pericardium, the muscle around your heart. Your heart itself is fine, going by the numbers."

"But I can go now?" He pauses. "You're not... going to tell my Dad, are you?"

"I can't exactly hide the ER bills from him," Crabtree says, tone dry. "I'll have a nurse bring your discharge instructions, and there will be some paperwork. I expect you to discuss this with your psychiatrist, but that's just common sense."

Then Crabtree leaves, and Derek pins Stiles to his seat with a green-eyed glare. His eyes flash red for a heartbeat - just long enough for Stiles's pulse to spike, which causes Derek to raise an eyebrow, thanks, man - and then he grumbles, "I told you it made your heart sound wrong."

"Shut up," Stiles replies, suddenly tired of absolutely everything. "You don't know what it's like. You don't get to judge."

* * *

There's a nurse, and a sheaf of papers, and Derek signing his HIPAA paperwork. Derek covers the ER copay and some part of him is furious that BH General is charging him (Derek, really) a hundred fucking bucks for an ibuprofen prescription (why would he even fill that?), an instruction to avoid all stimulants and depressants for the rest of the night, and a lecture about medication management. It could have been worse; they could have assumed he'd gotten it illegally and abused it, could have given him the "Adderall and alcohol don't mix" lecture.

But it still fucking galls him.

And Derek hasn't said another word about it. He's not telling him to scale his dose back, he's not rubbing it in Stiles's face.

"Quit judging," Stiles says, a little sulkily, once they're back in the Camaro.

"I'm not."

"Then why aren't you giving me some _na-na, told you so_ lecture?"

Derek turns the key in the ignition. The Camaro purrs, and Derek's fingers flex on the steering wheel. His eyes are a gray-green in the lights off the console, steely lookinng. He takes his sweet time forming a reply before he finally says, "I felt how much it hurt."

"So, what, it's pity or something?"

"No," Derek says, and glares. There's a long silence, and then he says, "That kind of pain is its own lesson."

Stiles isn't really so sure. He's pretty sure he's been put through the ringer when it comes to the supernatural and pain and fear, but he hasn't kicked Scott or Derek out of his life. Pain's not actually that great a teacher.

But he's too tired of existing to bother arguing with Derek. And he's sure as shit not going to let himself double dose again. Maybe he hasn't taken the right lesson away from this, but Scott needs him. He's not going to let Scott - or Derek, or the Leather Triplets, he guesses - down just because he can't concentrate and can't settle. But at least he'll try to stay out of the hospital.

It's always hyper-something, he thinks. And all he can do is try.


End file.
